Applied Cryptography
As a building block for secure systems, cryptography is important in cyber security. Our cryptography research focuses on:
Secure cryptographic applications - including building secure applications using cryptography and verifying security of systems using cryptography;
Post-quantum cryptography - including developing new post-quantum cryptographic primitives and verifying security of existing post-quantum cryptographic primitives;
Linking cryptography with software engineering - aiming to fill the gap between cryptography designers and software developers.
Current Projects
Formal Verification of Post-Quantum Cryptographic Primitives (UQ Cyber Seed Funding)
In this project we aim to develop new verification techniques of post-quantum cryptographic primitives. Quantum computers will be a real threat to public-key cryptography which is used to secure all digital communication in today’s world. The security of these cryptographic primitives is provided by their complex security proofs which are prone to errors. In the case of post-quantum security, the security proofs are even more complex than in the classical setting. Therefore, to ensure a high guarantee of post-quantum cryptographic security, simple security proofs performed by humans are not sufficient to provide confidence in those primitives. Formal verification methods which are performed by software are highly required. In this project we will investigate and develop new formal verification methods.
Researchers: Dr. Naipeng Dong, Dr. Guangdong Bai, Dr. Veronika Kuchta
Geometric Cryptography (UQ Cyber Seed Funding)
Modern cryptography is, at its core, based on mathematical problems that are easy in one direction (e.g., multiplication) but extremely hard in the other (e.g., factorisation). However, with the advent of quantum computing, problems that were once thought hard will become feasible, and widely-used cryptographic schemes will become insecure as a result. In this project we will build new schemes that can resist quantum computers, based on core problems from geometry and topology, a branch of pure mathematics where computation is often extremely difficult, and whose cryptographic potential is still untapped.
Researchers: Dr. Veronika Kuchta, Prof. Benjamin Burton, Dr. Naipeng Dong
Related Thesis Projects
Graphical cryptography (Prof. Ryan Ko, Dr. Naipeng Dong, Dr. Veronika Kuchta)
Cyber Attacks Implementation and Testing to Privacy Preserving Machine Learning Techniques (Dr. Dan Kim)
Privacy-preserving framework for storing and processing Indigenous language data (Prof. Ryan Ko, Dr. Yanjun Zhang)
Hash Function Cryptanalysis (Prof. Ryan Ko, Mr. Taejun Choi)
Security protocol verification - algorithms and tool development (Dr. Naipeng Dong)